TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)
-------------------------------------------
Charter
Last Modified: 2006-08-08
Current Status: Active Working Group
Chair(s):
Ted Faber
Mark Allman
Transport Area Director(s):
Magnus Westerlund
Lars Eggert
Transport Area Advisor:
Lars Eggert
Mailing Lists:
General Discussion:tcpm@ietf.org
To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tcpm
Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/index.html
Description of Working Group:
TCP is currently the Internet's predominant transport protocol.
To maintain TCP's utility the IETF has regularly updated both the
protocol itself and the congestion control algorithms implemented by
the protocol that are crucial for the stability of the Internet.
These changes reflect our evolving understanding of transport
protocols, congestion control and new needs presented by an ever-
changing network. The TCPM WG will provide a venue within the IETF to
work on these issues. The WG will serve several purposes:
* The WG will mostly focus on maintenance issues (e.g., bug
fixes) and modest changes to the protocol and algorithms
that maintain TCP's utility.
* The WG will be a venue for moving current TCP specifications
along the standards track (as community energy is available
for such efforts).
* The WG will write a document that outlines "what is TCP".
This document will be a roadmap of sorts to the various TCP
specifications in the RFC series.
TCPM will take a subset of the work which has been conducted in the
Transport Area WG over the past several years.
Specifically, some of the WG's initial work will be moved from the
Transport Area WG (tsvwg).
TCPM is expected to be the working group within the IETF to handle TCP
changes. Proposals for additional TCP work items should be brought up
within the working group. While fundamental changes to TCP or its
congestion control algorithms (e.g., departure from loss-based
congestion control) should be brought through TCPM, it is expected
that such large changes will ultimately be handled by the Transport
Area WG (tsvwg). All additional work items for TCPM will, naturally,
require the approval of the Transport Services Area Area Directors and
the IESG.
TCP's congestion control algorithms are the model followed by alternate
transports (e.g., SCTP and (in some cases) DCCP). In addition, the
IETF has recently worked on several documents about algorithms that
are specified for multiple protocols (e.g., TCP and SCTP) in the same
document. Which WG shepherds such documents in the future will
determined on a case-by-case basis. In any case, the TCPM WG will
remain in close contact with other relevant WGs working on these
protocols to ensure openness and stringent review from all angles.
Specific Goals:
* A document specifying a way to share the local "User TimeOut"
value with the peer such that TCP connections can withstand long
periods of disconnection.
* The WG is coming to grips with how to deal with spoofed segments
that can tear down connections, cause data corruption or
performance problems. To this end the WG is generating an
overview document as well as a scheme that mitigates some of the
issues brought on by spoofed TCP segments using a
challenge-response scheme to reduce the probabilities of a
connection being impacted. Finally, the WG will produce a
document outlining the potential impact of using ICMP messages
to attack TCP streams.
* The WG is writing an informational document about the ways in
which TCPs can handle ICMP "soft errors".
* The WG is updating the specification for Explicit Congestion
Notification to allow for the use of ECN during part of TCP's
three-way handshake to aid performance for short transfers.
* The WG is writing an informational document that discusses
commonly used, but not documented ways to combat SYN flooding
attacks.
* The WG is updating RFC 2581 to fix some minor specification
problems and move it along the standards track.
Goals and Milestones:
Done Submit FRTO draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental
RFC
Done Submit TCP Roadmap document to IESG for publication as a Best
Current Practices RFC
Done Submit NCR Reordering Mitigation draft to the IESG for
publication as an Experimental RFC
Sep 2006 Submit overview of spoofing attacks against TCP to IESG for
publication as an Informational RFC.
Oct 2006 Submit In-Window Attack draft to IESG for publication as a
Proposed Standard RFC.
Oct 2006 Submit revision of RFC 2581 to the IESG for publication as a
Draft Standard.
Nov 2006 Submit User TimeOut option document to the IESG for publication
as a Proposed Standard RFC.
Nov 2006 Submit ECN-SYN document to the IESG for publication as a
Proposed Standard RFC.
Jan 2007 Submit SYN flooding document to the IESG for publication as an
Informational RFC.
Jan 2007 Submit soft errors document to the IESG for publication as an
Informational RFC.
Jan 2007 Submit ICMP attack document to the IESG for publication as an
Informational RFC.
Internet-Drafts:
Posted Revised I-D Title
------ ------- --------------------------------------------
Apr 2004 Jul 2007
Improving TCP's Robustness to Blind In-Window Attacks
May 2005 Jun 2007
TCP User Timeout Option
Jan 2006 Jul 2007
Adding Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Capability to
TCP's SYN/ACK Packets
Jan 2006 Sep 2007
TCP Congestion Control
Feb 2006 Jun 2007
TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors
Jun 2007 Jun 2007
Forward RTO-Recovery (F-RTO): An Algorithm for Detecting
Spurious Retransmission Timeouts with TCP
Request For Comments:
RFC Stat Published Title
------- -- ----------- ------------------------------------
RFC4138 E Aug 2005 Forward RTO-Recovery (F-RTO): An Algorithm for Detecting
Spurious Retransmission Timeouts with TCP and the Stream
Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
RFC4653 E Aug 2006 Improving the Robustness of TCP to Non-Congestion Events
RFC4614 I Sep 2006 A Roadmap for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
Specification Documents
RFC4953 I Jul 2007 Defending TCP Against Spoofing Attacks
RFC4987 I Aug 2007 TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common Mitigations